I like writing verse every now and then -usually just after another failed romance. (Not poetry, never poetry, that’s a whole other ball park. You got to be seriously messed up to be able to knock out the real good stuff, not just some suburban legend in his own lunchtime.)
So I thought I’d have a bash at a sonnet. Never tried them before. Went for the Shakespearean format: ABABCDCD EFEFGG. Though mine was not to a ‘dark lady’. To a blonde, actually.
Two things about the finished product might jump out to the reader.
One: Aberystwyth Grits mudstone makes a good tablet to write on.
Two: the sonnet isn’t very good.
But no need to be downhearted: a happy thought occurs: I can simply get Artificial Intelligence to write me another one. A better one! Could it do it, why certainement! And even more exciting than that, I could then get to write another, and another, and another. Get this: if I want it to I can get it to produce a sonnet every two minutes… for the next ten years. How wonderful is that?
Sonnets sorted. Forever.
Apparently there’s an enterprising fellow in US who is already making $1000s churning out AI novels under his own name. The ultimate post-modern artform. The really striking thing about that is not the enterprising gent himself. Good luck to him. Snake oil medicaments made of river mud, piss and batshit have always been easily shiftable. No, the really wonderful thing here is that for him to make those $1000s, there must be equivalent thousands of wankpuffins out there actually buying the shit, and expending whole hours of their sad, coffee-table existences reading it. Maybe the same people who read following their finger along the lines.
Mind you, no need to do that anymore; you can programme (sorry, program) a virtual finger to do it for you and, one supposes, at the end get the virtual finger to poke itself up a virtual butt. Oooh matron!
But there’s some ‘nervous Susans’ among the techbros who seem to think that AI might get bored of writing shit books and decide instead to wipe out civilisation. Bit of a downer, to be honest but, thank goodness, the greatest thinker of our age, Donald J. Trump, has declared that all such fears are ‘hoaxes’.
So see you in the first bar on the road to Perdition. Mine’s a treble Penderyn!
Toodles!
Acknowledgements due:
To funky new-romantic group ‘Modern Romance’ for the inspiration for the title.
To the irreplaceable Rod Liddle for the indispensable term ‘wankpuffin’.
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